Chaired/Moderated by: MaybeItsFate co-founders Rebecca Norton & Clare Hirn

THE PATTERNS UNDERNEATH

Our next Louisville LASER Talks will take place Sunday, May 17th at 1:30pm, with artist and educator Susanna Crum, fiber artist Briana Frederick, and 2025-26 Louisville Orchestra Creator-in-Residence Chelsea Komschlies.

When: Sunday / May 17th / 1:30 pm / EST

Where: MaybeItsFate, 1425 Story Ave, 40206 

Website: www.maybeitsfate.com

Speakers

Susanna Crum conducts research-led projects that investigate maps and printed ephemera as social artifacts at the intersection of past, present, and future. With cyanotype, lithography, video, and sculpture, she merges digital and analog technologies and emphasizes print media’s roles in maintaining relationships – and erasures – between people and place. Her multilayered images combine community-based research with archival materials like letters, maps, newspapers, and oral histories, and propose an interpretation of place in which past and present are concurrent and vital.

Briana Frederick is a weaver, wife, human & goat mama in Louisville, Kentucky. She brings together varied fibers, textures & colors to create functional wearable art, most often in the form of cowls, scarves & neckerchiefs. She also has two Nigora goats, Betty & Boon, who produce fiber for many pieces. 

Briana graduated in 2007 with a BFA in Fiber, specializing in weaving. From there she fled the art world & joined the Peace Corps, working & living with rural women weavers in a small village in the Middle Atlas Mountains where people lived close to their food & other natural resources. After Morocco she moved on to sustainable farming in Massachusetts, where she met her eventual partner. After settling in Kentucky & saddled with college debt she became a Licensed Massage Therapist & farmed on the side. Making art or weaving again were far from her mind. After the birth of her first child in 2014 she became interested in woven wraps to carry him in. Rather than buy a wrap she decided to purchase a used loom & weave her own. She soon fell deeply back in love with weaving. Making wraps at first, but soon rediscovered her joy in small color, fiber & texture studies, conveniently of a size suited to cowls.

Renowned for her music's "ingratiating allure" (San Diego Story), Chelsea Komschlies blends the familiar and the strange in uncanny ways. Ms. Komschlies prioritizes perception of her music by the human brain and shared experiences among listeners. Her compositions, each a distinct fantasy world, evoke vivid multisensory imagery and a range of psycho-emotional landscapes, from whimsical nostalgia and camp to eerie disquiet, and from altered states of consciousness to glittering spiritual awe. 

A Ph.D. candidate in composition under Jean Lesage at McGill University, Ms. Komschlies has been honored with McGill’s Andrew Svoboda Prize for Orchestral Composition and the Research Alive Student Prize. The Fonds de Recherche du Québec further supports her thesis work on how composers can encode shared multisensory information like light, color, and texture in a science-backed way, and has recognized her as the top-ranked music research project in the province. Ms. Komschlies’ work has been acknowledged and supported by the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation, the Hermitage, Fromm, and ASCAP Foundations, the Alfred Casella Award from the Curtis Institute of Music, and the Copland House. Presenters include Alarm Will Sound, the Bozzini Quartet, the Quasar Saxophone Quartet, the Tucson,  Omaha, Vermont, Pittsburgh, Steamboat, and Lima Symphonies, the TIME SPANS festival, Grant Park Music Festival, Choral Arts Philadelphia, the Fifth House Ensemble, Codes d’accèss (Montreal), Le Vivier (Montreal), the Boulanger Initiative, Make Music Chicago, and Star Trek: The Cruise. Ms. Komschlies continues her collaboration with the Tucson Symphony and other consortium orchestras under the auspices of the Virginia B. Toulmin Commissions program through the American League of Orchestras, crafting a new work set to premiere in 2025. Ms. Komschlies’ future musical goals include leveraging immersive VR and AI-assisted film techniques in her works to further transport her listeners.

MaybeItsFate is a Louisville-based and member-owned social collective and club. Our mission is to foster the conditions for emergence — the emergence of new connections, ideas, art, and opportunities — through spaces designed for anyone who desires to be plugged into the creative pulse of the city. The collective is a member-owned cooperative that fosters a physical space and virtual space to fulfill its mission. The physical space offers a public art gallery and a members-only salon. The virtual space offers access to ideas, art, events, and opportunities for members from anywhere.

@maybeitsfatesocial